



MES HOGG 



AND 



HIS POETRY 



By 



WILLIAM WALLACE, LL.D. 



Zbe fmtckerbocfcet press 

27 and 29 West Twenty-third Street, 

NEW YORK 
1903 



JAMES HOGG 

AND 

HIS POETRY 



WILLIAM WALLACE, LL.D. 



' 









Gbe "Knickerbocker press 

27 and 29 West Twenty-third Street, 

NEW YORK 

1903 



1 HL LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

FEB 4 1903 

Copyngnt Entry 
CLASS OS XXc. No. 
COPY 



11 



■W3 



Copyright, 1903, 

by 

WILLIAM WALLACE. 



.. •:• 



James Hogg and his Poetry 

THE personality of James Hogg, the Ettrick 
Shepherd, is one of the most likable in 
Scottish literature; and that may be said even 
more truly of the Hogg of history than of the 
Hogg of phantasy, to use Professor Ferrier's 
phrase, who is enshrined in "Noctes Am- 
brosianae." These are two quite distinct per- 
sonalities, for the real Hogg was not voluble in 
conversation, but could only emit an occasional 
quaint or poetical flash; he was convivial, but 
not a gourmand; he was simply an untaught 
shepherd, endowed with poetical genius, the 
proper issue of a race of pious, unaffected, 
superstitious country folk, a noble specimen 
in physique and morale of the peasantry of 
Scotland, capable of bearing adversity with in- 
domitable cheerfulness, a true singer, and un- 
equalled in any literature, at least in the poetic 
realisation of fairyland. The word Border 
poetry calls up inevitably in the mind not only 
the ballads collected and imitated by Scott — 
who, by the way, drew from the memory's 
store of, among others, Hogg's mother — not 
only Lady Grisell Baillie, Jane Elliot of Minto, 



2 James Hogg 

and Mrs. Cockburn ; but pre-eminently James 
Hogg, who was the first to be consciously in- 
spired by the characteristic Border scenery of 
round green hills, lonely glens, and clear rush- 
ing streams, who made Yarrow, Ettrick, and 
St. Mary's Loch into poetical symbols, and 
has drawn to the country innumerable pilgrims 
of sentiment from Wordsworth down. 

Hogg was born at the end of 1770, in a cot- 
tage on the bank of the Ettrick, Selkirkshire. 
The name Hogg is a corruption of the Scan- 
dinavian Haig, still preserved by the ancient 
family of Bemersyde. His father, Robert, was 
descended from a line of Border shepherds, 
and, like his son after him, saved money 
enough to stock a sheep farm, only to involve 
himself in difficulties and descend to his original 
rank a few years after James' birth, when the 
poet's short school life of some six months in 
all came to an end. 

At seven Hogg was a cowherd barely know- 
ing how to write, and able with pains only to 
read the Bible, but doubtless well stocked with 
the ballads and legendary lore of Ettrick Forest 
(Selkirkshire), of which his mother was a re- 
pository. In the naive and self-complacent 
1 ' Memoirs of the Author's Life, ' ' he retails the 
recollections of his hard life with a wealth of 
detail; how, though it would "scarcely be be- 



and his Poetry 3 

lieved," he loved a rosy-cheeked maiden at 
eight, served a dozen masters before he was 
fifteen, and never served one without getting 
a verbal recommendation to the next, " espe- 
cially for my inoffensive behaviour " ; how he 
remembered "being particularly bare of shirts"; 
how he bought a violin when he was fourteen, 
and learned the Psalms of David by heart. 
His youth, receptive as it must have been to 
the influence of his environment, was plainly 
uninfluenced by literature in any shape save 
only Routh. He confesses that he read "The 
Life and Adventures of Sir William Wallace ' ! 
and "The Gentle Shepherd " in his eighteenth 
year without emotion or appreciation. But 
the father of Blackhouse (father of his and 
Scott's friend, William Laidlaw), whom the 
poet served for ten years from 1790, had a 
library, and on the hillside the Shepherd read 
Milton, Pope, and Thomson. His mind was 
stirred, and at last he began to write; but not 
till an incentive came from a more fortunate 
quarter. 

A half-witted fellow met him on the hill one 
day, and repeated to him the whole of "Tarn 
o' Shanter. " Burns had just died. Hogg 
had never heard of him, and when the "natural" 
related the story of the farmer poet and singer, 
the Shepherd's emulation was moved, and so 



4 James Hogg 

his first painful essays in composition were 
lyric. Professor Veitch, himself a Border poet, 
has pictured once for all the genesis of Hogg's 
verse-making: 

"I like to picture Hogg at this period, as he 
herded on the Hawkshaw Rig, up the Douglas 
Burn — a dark heathery slope of the Blackhouse 
Heights, which divide the Blackhope Burn 
from the other main feeders of the Douglas. 
There, on a summer day, during these ten 
years, you would find on the hill a ruddy-faced 
youth, of middle height, of finely symmetrical 
and agile form, with beaming light blue eyes, 
and a profusion of light brown hair that fell 
over his shoulders, long, fair, and lissome as a 
woman's. Now it was here in those long sum- 
mer days, that extend from morn to gloamin', 
and amid similar scenes in Ettrick and in Yar- 
row, that this simple, untaught, yet impas- 
sioned shepherd lad, with his heart full of the 
lore his mother and grey-haired men had 
taught him, developed the peculiar cast of his 
poetic genius. It was thus he learned to love 
simple, free, solitary nature so intensely; it 
was thus that his heart soared with and yearned 
after the 'Skylark ' of a morning, and swelled 
into lyric passion of an evening, 'When the 
Kye comes Hame'; it was thus he learned to 
conceive those exquisite visions of Fairy and 



and his Poetry 5 

Fairyland which he has embodied in ' Kilmeny , ' 
to feel and express the power of the awful and 
weird in a way such as almost no modern poet 
has expressed them, as in 'The Fate of Mac- 
gregor,' 'The Abbot M'Kinnon,' 'The Witch 
of Fife,' and others — to revel, in a word, in a 
remote, ideal, supersensible, yet most ethereal 
beauty and grandeur, which has a spell we do 
not seek to analyse." 

Hogg's songs were written to be sung by the 
farm girls, and quickly became part of the cur- 
rency of the musical over a wide district. The 
first to attain the dignity of print was "Donald 
Macdonald," written in 1800 in defiance of 
French invasion. It was at once popular, but 
Hogg complained that "no one ever knew or 
inquired who was the author." About this 
time Scott found him out, and encouraged him 
to persevere. In 1801 he published a still-born 
volume of "Scottish Pastorals," but he had to 
suffer his first serious reverse of fortune before 
he commenced publishing in earnest. With 
^200 he had saved he took in 1804 a lease of 
a Hebridean sheep farm ; the speculation failed 
in the inception, and penniless he betook him- 
self to shepherding in Nithsdale. 

When the first volume of Scott's "Min- 
strelsy" appeared, Hogg thought to rival his 
friend's performance, and with that friend's 



6 James Hogg 

countenance Constable brought out for him 
"The Mountain Bard," a small collection of 
original ballads, mostly of poor quality and 
little promise. By this book, however, and 
an essay, "The Shepherd's Guide," generally 
called "Hogg on Sheep," he made ^300, and 
straightway started farming again. He began 
on too large a scale, and once more his purse 
was emptied. This second failure turned his 
country-folk against him ; no one would hire 
him again as a shepherd, and in February, 
1810, he went to Edinburgh, and set about 
making a living by his pen. 

It was a hard struggle, but Grieve, a native 
of the Forest, in business in the capital, gave 
him a home. He wrote hard; bundled all the 
songs he had by him into "The Forest Min- 
strel," which did not pay, although the Count- 
ess of Dalkeith gave him one hundred guineas 
for the dedication ; started a weekly journal, 
"The Spy," the greater part of which, prose 
and verse, he contributed himself, and which 
died within a year; and dallied with the drama 
— in vain. He made many friends, and re- 
tained, in spite of his querulous vanity, the 
affection of Scott, who tried hard to get him 
a permanent post of some kind; and the hard- 
headed Shepherd never lost his head in an 
ultra-convivial society, though the jollities of 



and his Poetry 7 

a mad Right and Wrong Club cost him a 
dangerous illness. 

After three years of unprofitable labour and 
scheming, journalising, and quarrelling with 
publishers, he made a hit in 1813 — and it was 
a great hit — with "The Queen's Wake." But 
though it won fame for him, it brought him 
little cash, his publisher having failed just after 
the issue of the third edition. Profit, how- 
ever, came in other ways. In Principal Shairp's 
words, the book "secured for him the acquaint- 
ance of Wilson, Lockhart, Southey, Words- 
worth, even Byron — made him, in fact, free of 
that great poetic brotherhood which then 
illumined England." Byron commended the 
work to John Murray, who became Hogg's 
London publisher and his friend. To relieve 
his pressing necessity the poet again appealed 
to the Duchess of Buccleuch (the Countess of 
Dalkeith, to whom "The Forest Minstrel " was 
dedicated), and at her behest, after her death 
in the following year, 1814, the Duke gave him 
at a nominal rent the small farm of Altrive 
Lake on the Yarrow. Having no capital, he 
conceived the idea of getting some by a book 
of poems contributed by his distinguished 
friends; but Scott declining on the character- 
istic plea that "every herring should hing by 
its ain heid," Hogg parodied him, Words- 



8 James Hogg 

worth, Byron, Southey, Coleridge, Wilson, 
and himself in "The Poetic Mirror." He 
published also two volumes of dramatic tales, 
which were unsuccessful, and Scott, Black- 
wood, and others helped him to bring out an 
illustrated edition of "The Queen's Wake." 

For the rest of his life Hogg was a farmer- 
litterateur who, while fully conscious of the 
considerable place he had won in the world of 
letters, was spurred to write mainly by the 
necessity of making good by his pen his losses 
on sheep. Here is a catalogue of his later 
works: 1815, "The Pilgrims of the Sun"; 
1816, "Mador of the Moor"; 1817, "The 
Brownie of Bodsbeck" (a prose tale of the 
Covenanting persecution) ; 1819-20, "Jacobite 
Relics of Scotland " (two volumes of verse 
collected by him in numerous journeys to the 
Highlands, together with some of his own best 
lyrics on Highland and "Prince Charlie' 
themes); 1820, "Winter Evening Tales" 
(prose); 1822, "The Three Perils of Man' 
(prose tales); 1823, "The Three Perils of 
Woman" (ditto); 1824, "Confessions of a 
Fanatic " (ditto); 1826, "Queen Hynde " (epic 
poem); 1829, "The Shepherd's Calendar" a 
collection of articles contributed to "Black- 
wood's Magazine"; 1834, "Lay Sermons," 
"The Domestic Manners and Public Life of 



and his Poetry 9 

Sir Walter Scott," and the first of a series of 
"Montrose Tales." 

All the while he kept up his connection with 
Edinburgh. Robert Chambers has told of the 
rude conviviality which his visits provoked in a 
circle that loved and admired him. "Maga, " 
Lockhart, and Wilson used and abused him ; 
it was to the seventh number of the magazine 
that he contributed the famous "Chaldee 
Manuscript " (not all his, of course) which can 
only be mentioned here. He was a hospitable 
host to his neighbours, and to the crowds of 
pilgrims who made Altrive almost as sacred a 
shrine as Abbotsford. Wordsworth visited 
him in 18 14, and he repaid the visit at Rydal. 
The relationship with Scott was never broken. 
To his neighbours he was a "kind-hearted 
chield " who "gied himsel' nae airs." Had he 
been content to farm Altrive he might have 
had leisure to produce better work; but when 
he married in 1820 Margaret Phillips, an An- 
nandale woman slightly above him in social 
standing, he took on also at a high rent the 
farm of Mount Benger on the opposite bank of 
the Yarrow, and lost .£2000 before his seven 
years' lease was out. 

In 1832, he visited London and was feted 
by the literary world : Carlyle says he talked 
and behaved like a "gomeril " (donkey), and 



io James Hogg 

wore a plaid at the suggestion of his publisher 
for the time, who straightway failed, after the 
manner of Hogg's publishers. He died of a 
liver complaint in November, 1835. 

It is impossible to deny Hogg's genius. All 
that may be legitimately said in depreciation 
of the mass of rubbish and commonplace which 
he produced merely throws into stronger relief 
the perfection of his achievement in "Kil- 
meny " and "The Skylark. " His ' ' Mador of 
the Moor" and "Queen Hynde " are poor 
enough journeyman's manufacture. For his 
form and measures he went frankly enough to 
school to Scott and Bishop Percy. His vo- 
cabulary is not rich, and close as he comes to 
the heart of nature in descriptive poetry, his 
fidelity to epithets such as "brown mountain," 
which he has conventionalised, is irritating. 
He prided himself on his knowledge of the 
Scotch language, but was not in reality an ex- 
pert, and sinned as deeply as Chatterton in the 
use of the sham antique. Yet all his work that 
deserves to be remembered is original in every 
sense of the word; much of it is in a class by 
itself, and a high class at that. He was in- 
ordinately vain, yet his apostrophe to Scott is 
not altogether ludicrous: "Ye can never sup- 
pose that I belang to your school of chivalry. 
Ye are the king o' that school, but I 'm king 



and his Poetry n 

o' the mountain and fairy school, which is a 
far higher ane than yours." It is true, as 
Shairp put it, that "no other poet in our lan- 
guage has ever described fairyland so well, or 
embodied the whole underworld of ghosts, 
spectres, wraiths, brownies, water-kelpies, with 
such an eerie, thrilling sense of reality." 
Among painters of nature, too, despite the ten- 
dency to stereotyped epithet noticed before, 
Hogg occupies a high place. He was veri- 
tably inspired by the mountain and the moor, 

The glowing suns of spring, 
The genial shower and stealing dew, 

the "lea " starred with "snowy gems." He had 

Viewed the Errick waving clear, 
When shadowy flocks of purest snow 
Seemed grazing in a world below ; 

and wrote of sun and storm, green hills and 
wild birds, not so much for the purpose of 
painting a definite background for action as 
because he had to find a vent for the emotions 
which Nature roused in him. His skill in the 
portrayal of action was indeed variable; com- 
pare the success of "The Witch of Fife," in 
which interest is divided between the action 
and the environment of nature and demon- 
ology, with the comparative failure of "Earl 
Walter," a ballad of action pure and simple. 



12 James Hogg 

They were healthy thoughts that came to him 
in the ten years of his making on the Douglas 
Burn. The skylark was an "emblem of happi- 
ness." "The sheeted flame and sounding 
rain," "heaven's own breast and mountain 
torn " by the thunder, were to him "nature's 
grand turmoil." There is not a trace of the 
morbid in his poetry. Like Kilmeny herself 
his handling of the world of romance, of 
Border violence, witchcraft and fairy, is "pure 
as pure could be." Hogg had no conception 
of what is grandiloquently called "architec- 
tonic " in literature. He failed to write even 
a passable long poem, for even "The Queen's 
Wake " is saved by part of its contents only; 
he invented no new form of verse, and attained 
no particular skill in the heroic couplet which 
Scott's example lured him to essay. But his 
best ballads are almost of the first class, though 
most are utterly spoiled by verbiage and pro- 
lixity. His best songs are among the best of 
their class; in these he attained the perfection 
of form as by instinct. It is no more a dis- 
paragement of him to say that he imitated his 
predecessors and contemporaries than to say 
of Burns that he imitated Fergusson. His 
success in "The Poetic Mirror " suggests that, 
with a finer appreciation of form in literature, 
he might have gone far in departments into 



and his Poetry 13 

which he did not seek to enter. Considering 
his origin and his native habit of mind, the 
restraint of his humour is remarkable. 

As to his personality it only requires to be 
added that if his alleged rudeness is worth dis- 
cussion, Professor Ferrier has probably come 
nearest the mark in his appreciation : 

"There was a hearty homeliness of manner 
about Hogg, and a Doric simplicity of address, 
which were exceedingly prepossessing. He 
sometimes carried a little too far the privileges 
of an innocent rusticity . . . but in gen- 
eral his slight deviations from etiquette were 
rather amusing than otherwise." 

We can still laugh at the story of Hogg's 
first visit to the Scotts when, finding Mrs. 
Scott extended upon one sofa, he stretched 
his brawny limbs upon another; and in his ad- 
dress to his host and hostess progressed in the 
course of the evening from "Mr. Scott" 
through "Shirra" (sheriff) to "Walter" and 
"Wattie," and from "Mrs. Scott" to "Char- 
lotte." But it seems ludicrous to the present 
generation that any one should have been 
deeply offended by his "Domestic Manners, 
&c," or that Lockhart in his turn could have 
been charged with malignity for his references 
to Hogg in the "Life." And one cannot 
wish that he had been modester, since his 



FEB 5 1903 



1 4 James Hogg 

vanity enriched literature with the story of his 
resentment of the fancied slight he suffered at 
Wordsworth's hands at Rydal. 

In this volume* an attempt has been made 
to confine selection to what of Hogg's work 
deserves to survive. Only "The Queen's 
Wake " has been printed entire, although a 
considerable proportion of it is as second- 
rate as "Mador of the Moor" and Hogg's 
other ambitious essays, which are as dead as 
"Thalaba." His prose scarcely fails to be 
noticed here; but it may be said that he de- 
rived his inspiration in this medium also from 
Scott, and that, working upon ample materials, 
historical, adventurous, tragic, magical, he 
combined great fluency with supreme weak- 
ness in construction. His "Confessions of a 
Fanatic," which has been erroneously ascribed 
to other hands, is, however, perfect in its way, 
and shows what Hogg could have done had he 
but taken pains to master the art which Scott 
himself had to learn. But art was to Hogg, as 
readers of "The Queen's Wake " will see, some- 
thing to be eschewed as inimical to inspiration. 

* The article forms the introduction to a selection of James 
Hogg's poems edited and annotated by Professor William 
Wallace, LL.D. Isbister & Co., Ltd. 



